Weißes Rauschen

It's funny when you encounter a film with so many likeable elements that simply never cohere into something that works. This film reminded me of "I Heart Huckabees" in that sense ... I enjoyed all the parts considered in isolation, but the film itself is decidedly less than the sum of it's parts.

The film is divided into three acts. We're introduced to star professor of Hitler Studies Adam Driver and his wife Greta Gerwig and their children (almost all from different spouses) in the first act, which gestures at parodying academia without really landing much.

In the middle act, a train crash causes the Airborne Toxic Event ... a cloud of poisonous chemicals that descends on town and causes the family to evacuate. This is the most successful part of the film, impressively staging the event like a darkly comedic disaster film.

The final act is ... a lot less clear and probably best not spoiled. It deals with our need to distract ourselves from the terrors of life with medicine and consumerism. It descends into talky meandering and is really only saved by a magnificent musical number over the end credits.

There's really a lot to like. I found it to be intermittently quite funny. The performances are great, especially Don Cheadle as a fellow professor trying to establish a specialization in Elvis Studies. It's a hugely ambitious film with a unique visual style. I only wish I could say I actually liked it.

For the first hour of White Noise, I found myself very entertained. But for the second half I found myself incredibly bored. They felt like two separate films. If the first half had just been the whole film. I probably would have have given this film an 8. Or possibly a 9. It goes from being an apocalyptic family satire, to a revenge tale. I believe Noah Baumbach didn't even know what exactly he was going for. White Noise was average. The two aspects holding me back from giving it a 4 are again the first half and another stellar performance from Adam Driver. Nowhere near as good as Marriage Story. Then again they are very different films.

As someone who didn't read the book the movie is based on, i will say that i did not connect with this movie or the characters. Am ok with not connecting with characters but the characters in this movie are hard to understand which is odd because they talk and talk (usually at 100 miles an hour and over each other) so you think they would be all out in the open but it was like a wall between them and me. Like i completely failed to understand what it was that the author was saying about the world or the country when he wrote the book. Though i assume that the book was making some sort of commentary about the state of affairs because this movie feels somewhat too large in scale to just be a movie about coming to term with mortality and the difficulties that can arise in a marriage. Like the movie isn't bad but what are you? I will watch it again when it comes out on Netflix to try and see it with fresher eyes but if the purpose of the movie is to frustrate people so much that we rewatch it multiple times, i will say that they will succeed.

This film has some hilarious one liners and twisted distortions of reality. The first act had me so intrigued I was gripped. Then I was confused. Then I couldn't decide if it was a comedy intentionally or not.

The reality is this film doesn't quite know what it is, and if you think it's going to go somewhere or wrap anything up at the end then you are dead wrong.

Weird for weirds sake is the name of the game. Think of a psychedelic trip by someone who likes the smell of their own farts and decided to write it down.

A future cult classic in the making and I'm sure many people will revere this film for years to come; rewatching it for it's one liners and oddities. For me however one baffling, confusing watch is enough to last a lifetime.

It's obvious a lot of reviewers of this film had no idea what to expect because of having no idea what is in the book it's based on. I'm not criticizing; there's certainly an argument for the fact that an adaptation should work on its own, even if you're unfamiliar. I'm not objective because I've read the book, and I thought it was pretty stunning. As an adaptation, the movie replicated the experience I had reading it-which is what I wanted and expected.

I expected stylized dialogue and characters, with wildly surreal, satirical plot points united by theme rather than subject. If you don't understand what exactly unites the movie's acts and their progression, I struggle to explain it without getting overly spoilery but would suggest deeper investigation and checking out the novel, which is superb. To me, it makes sense. The interaction of the intensely personal with the broadly circumstantial creates a framework to discuss the capital I "Issue" that every human must deal with-and the ways we choose to cope, together and separately.

What I applaud Noah and his actors for is making me care. The book has a brilliant writing style, but its surreality failed to give me some of the visceral sucker punches managed by Adam and Greta in particular.

This film is not going to be for everyone, and I suspect its cast and crew was well aware of this. It's self-consciously extremely intellectual, long, and strange, with humor as dry as a desert. And it's purposefully unsettling. I would argue that it very much should be. It's making us look at something we all face daily-whether we like it or not.